Do Women Need Their Own Grid—Or To Race the Best, Full Stop?

Fifteen young women, one of the world’s most demanding sports, and a single shared goal: get a female driver back on the Formula 1 grid. That’s the real-world mission of F1 Academy, led by its managing director Susie Wolff—the first woman in 22 years to take part in an F1 weekend when she ran FP1 for Williams at Silverstone in 2014. Today, the Academy has enough momentum for its own Netflix docuseries (released May 28, 2025), which follows these drivers as they fight for speed, funding, and credibility. Formula 1® – The Official F1® Website+2Formula 1® – The Official F1® Website+2

But there’s an elephant in the room that can’t be glossed over with glossy trailers. As Gracie Opulanza—ten years in luxury-car reviewing Bentley’s notes, it is very often men who call women out when they’re seen at the wheel of serious machinery, and not in encouraging ways. Meanwhile, it’s the young girls who rush up in awe at male-dominated events, because seeing a woman succeeding in “the wrong room” lights a spark they rarely get to feel elsewhere. Culture, not just lap time, is on the line.

So: should women have their own grid—“their own boxing ring,” as Gracie puts it—or should the ladder collapse into one mixed pathway where the only metric is: are you fast enough?

Let’s tackle both sides honestly.

The Case for a Separate Grid (Now)

1) A safer, clearer on-ramp.
The brutal truth of junior single-seater racing is that seat time, coaching, and budget decide careers as much as talent. F1 Academy guarantees funded seats with top teams, professional operations, and visibility. It’s a scaffold, not a silo. Netflix’s spotlight matters because it magnetizes sponsors—and sponsor belief is the fuel of any career. Without a ring-fenced program, many promising drivers would never even start the engine. F1® Academy+1

2) Repair the pipeline before judging the outcome.
When people say “if she’s good enough, she’ll get there,” they often ignore the pipeline problem: too few girls in karting, too little investment in teenage years, and too many drop-off points when budgets spike. The Academy compresses that gap by standardizing equipment and giving each driver a megaphone. That’s not coddling; it’s infrastructure.

3) Role-model visibility, at scale.
Say what you want about Netflix—its reach regularly reshapes who shows up next season. F1 Academy’s series plants the idea in thousands of young minds that this is possible, normal, and exciting, not “other.” That expands grassroots participation, which eventually expands elite-level odds. Formula 1® – The Official F1® Website+1

4) The commercial step we actually have.
Beauty mogul Charlotte Tilbury’s sponsorship wasn’t charity; it was signal: brands see an audience and want in. When audience, brands, and broadcast align, a ladder becomes viable. That’s exactly how men’s feeder series were built. Financial Times

The Catch

Max Verstappen has been blunt: if the aim is F1, women need to be benchmarked against men, and the Academy’s machinery should be closer to the mainstream ladder. He’s argued the cars are “too slow,” the performance jump too big, and that true comparison only happens in mixed grids. Whether you love or loathe the delivery, the performance point is legitimate: to prepare for F1’s apex, you must fight near it. gpfans.com+1

The Case for One Mixed Ladder (Sooner)

1) Racing is the ultimate meritocracy—on the stopwatch.
The stopwatch doesn’t care about gender. Mixed racing throughout the ladder forces everyone to learn racecraft at the same aggression level, in the same traffic, with the same strategic risks. Verstappen’s other recurring line—“race anyone, not just females”—captures a widely held paddock view: to be ready for F1, you must be proven against the exact population you’ll face in F1. M Sports

2) Sponsors crave the purest comparison.
Brands love a clear story. If a woman beats men in the same car, in the same series, the narrative is nuclear-level marketable. That accelerates budgets, which accelerates careers. In a fragmented ladder, even strong results get questioned: “Yes, but against whom?” Mixed grids silence that.

3) You can’t simulate elbows-out chaos.
Racecraft is learned in the mess: late-braking into Turn 1 beside three rivals who all think they’re heroes. Mixed grids supply that chaos early and often—key for drivers who aim to climb. The earlier you master it, the less “culture shock” at F3/F2.

The Catch

Remove a ring-fenced women’s program too soon and you risk shrinking the overall pool. Without guaranteed funding and promotion, fewer girls start karting, fewer families hang in through the costly years, and you end up with the same old loop: “no women in F1 because there are no women ready; no women ready because there were no women supported.”

So… Should Women Have Their Own Grid?

Short answer: Yes—right now—and build the bridges to mixed competition faster. Think “separate, but permeable.” The Academy must not become a cul-de-sac; it must be a slip road into the same motorway as the men.

That means three urgent tweaks:

1. Raise the machinery ceiling. If the critique is “too slow,” meet it head-on. Up-power the spec, or bolt on a second tier (think F1 Academy-Plus) that matches F4 pace and prepares drivers to hop straight into F4/FRECA wildcards. You keep the safety net while tightening the competitive comparison. gpfans.com

2. Mandate mixed-grid crossovers. Each Academy champion (and top-three finishers) should get funded starts in recognized mixed series—F4, FRECA, F3 tests—within the same calendar year. Not a PR test day: proper race weekends, with points on the line.

3. Tie team incentives to integration. Every F1 team backing an Academy driver should commit to mixed-series mileage targets (sim and real) and publicize those benchmarks. Make the stepping-stone visible and verifiable.

Culture: The Lap Time Behind the Lap Time

The hostility women encounter around fast cars is not an abstract problem. Gracie’s been there—a decade of reviews, and it’s still often men who challenge legitimacy at the kerbside, while teenage girls flash that oh wow look because they’ve just seen someone crack the door open for them. That reaction is not soft culture war; it’s tangible performance infrastructure. When you’re welcomed, you push. When you’re constantly asked to prove you belong, you drive tight. Culture changes pace.

Susie Wolff’s story is instructive here. She didn’t just run FP1 in 2014; she parlayed the respect earned in that moment into a leadership role now shaping the feeder system. The fact that the Academy earned Netflix treatment shows there’s mainstream appetite to follow these arcs over seasons, not just weekends. And that matters, because narratives outlast lap charts. Formula 1® – The Official F1® Website+1

What Does Verstappen Think—and Does It Help?

Strip away the headlines, and Verstappen’s core is consistent: women should compete at the same pace and in the same arena, and F1 Academy must be a means, not the end. You can dislike the phrasing and still admit the performance logic helps sharpen the program. Making cars faster and guaranteeing mixed-grid exposure strengthens F1 Academy’s credibility, not weakens it. gpfans.com

Where I disagree with the “just throw them in” camp is timing. Without Academy-level scaffolding, you don’t fix the participation gap that begins in childhood and widens with each budget step. The ladder needs two rails: belonging and benchmarking. The Academy supplies belonging; mixed grids supply benchmarking. Only both together produce durable champions.

Gracie’s Provocation: “Women Need Their Own Boxing Ring”

Let’s treat that as a tactical statement, not a destination. Right now, yes: a dedicated ring is the fairest place to build muscle memory, confidence, and a sponsor story that isn’t drowned out by a thousand boys who’ve had 10 years more kart seat time. But the moment the jab lands, the guard must drop and the move must be into mixed fights that count. “Their own ring” should be the warm-up room—with a tunnel that opens onto the main card.

What Would Success Look Like in Five Years?

• Academy champions with mixed-grid silverware—not just tests, but trophies in F4/FRECA.

• A shorter tech gap between Academy cars and the mainstream ladder so the step doesn’t break ankles.

• Sponsors who commit multi-year across mixed series (not “pinkwashing” single-season stunts).

• A first woman back in F1 free practice, then a reserve seat, then a race seat—a sequence made credible because she’s already beaten men in the same machinery on the same weekends.

If the Academy stays a brand sandbox, it will be judged harshly. If it becomes a bridge that plenty of drivers cross—some fall, some fly, like every ladder—then the debate will shift from “should women have their own grid?” to “which team signs the quickest one?”

Until then, let’s be unconfused about what truly moves the needle. Visibility pulls in the next generation. Investment keeps them on track. Mixed competition proves the point. And culture—the everyday experience Gracie’s been living—either accelerates all of this or keeps the brakes on.

Right now, the Academy plus Netflix is a tailwind. Max’s critique is a headwind that forces better engineering. The destination is the same: the stopwatch decides, and a woman stands on an F1 podium because she was the fastest person there that day.

That’s not ideology. That’s motorsport.

The Susie Effect, the Fanbase Shift—and Where That Leaves Gracie

If you want proof that the audience is ready, look at Susie Wolff. Between her public leadership role and the Netflix spotlight, she’s amassed a seven-figure social following (≈1M on Instagram alone), giving F1 Academy a megaphone it never had. That visibility matters because the sport’s fastest-growing cohort is young women: multiple studies and reports across 2024–2025 show a surge among under-35 female fans, with 16–24/18–34 the breakout groups. Formula 1’s own 2025 Global Fan Survey highlights that F1 Academy already reaches 42% of female respondents—making it the second-most-followed series among women after F1 itself. Sponsors and broadcasters notice numbers like that. Reuters+3Instagram+3Formula 1® – The Official F1® Website+3

So where does that leave Gracie Opulanza, 54, with a decade of luxury-car reviewing outside the F1 paddock?

Right where the money, trust, and growth intersect.

• She bridges two markets the teams and sponsors want to merge: the new young-female fandom that’s arriving via Netflix/social + the established luxury/lifestyle audience with spending power. Gracie’s track record reviewing Bentleys, Rolls-Royces and boutique hotels converts aspirational eyeballs into premium conversions—exactly the kind of “lifestyle halo” brands like Charlotte Tilbury (an F1 Academy sponsor) have already moved on. Reuters

• She speaks to women who don’t need a lap chart to care. A growing slice of fans enters through story, style, travel, and behind-the-scenes access, then stays for the racing. That “culture first, competition second” on-ramp is now a feature of F1’s growth engine, not a bug. Gracie’s catalogue sits precisely there. Glamour

• She solves a credibility gap brands wrestle with. The audience skew is getting younger and more female, but C-suite buyers still ask, “Who can we trust to represent women around fast cars—without dumbing it down?” Ten years of luxury-auto testing is a rare credential set: she can translate performance, push back on condescension, and keep the tone aspirational.

• Her age is an asset, not a hurdle. The fastest-growing new fans are 18–34, but women already make up a large share of the overall base, and older fans command higher discretionary spend. Pair a 25-year-old’s fandom spark with a 50+ tastemaker’s purchasing lens and you’ve got the full funnel—from first TikTok to signed dealership contract. Forbes

Concrete roles Gracie can own (that Susie can’t, and vice-versa)

• The “Grid to Grand Tourer” storyteller. Use F1 Academy narratives as the on-ramp, then show how that engineering DNA flows into the luxury road cars women actually buy or aspire to (NVH, seating ergonomics, advanced driver-assist done right, color/material stories).

• Ambassador for women-first test drives and paddock hospitality. Design events where women are the default customer—calmer briefings, no “prove you know cars” energy, curated routes, safety & confidence coaching, and yes, child-care and fashion-friendly spaces. (That’s not fluff; it’s conversion infrastructure.)

• Mentor/host for Academy × luxury crossovers. Co-host a short-format video series: “From the Box to the Boulevard.” Each episode pairs an Academy driver with a road car that embodies a race-tech principle—braking, aero, chassis balance—keeping the tone friendly, not gatekeepy.

• Luxury-lifestyle partner for races with high female attendance. Think Jeddah, Miami, Singapore, Austin—races where the female share and “make a weekend of it” mindset are rising. Gracie’s hotel and travel chops convert F1 weekends into complete premium itineraries brands can sponsor. Reuters

• “Confidence at the Wheel” clinics. Bring her lived experience—being heckled by men in the UK while driving serious metal—into practical micro-workshops for new female drivers: parking big cars, reading mirrors/cameras, handling width and power respectfully, what to say/do when patronized at the dealership. That’s not content; that’s community building.

The editorial stance to print on a T-shirt

“Women need their own grid to build muscle—and the main grid to prove it.”
Pair Susie’s pipeline with Gracie’s lifestyle fluency and you serve newcomers and decision-makers.

Quick data points to drop in the copy

• F1 Academy’s female reach: 42% of surveyed women say they follow it; overall 23% of fans do—second only to F1 itself among women. Formula 1® – The Official F1® Website

• Women’s share of F1 fandom: around 41% globally, with 16–24 the fastest-growing age slice. Forbes

• Regional evidence: Nielsen-tracked spikes among young female fans (e.g., Middle East), with Netflix cited by a quarter of new fans as their entry point. Reuters

• Susie’s platform: ≈1M Instagram followers; Netflix docuseries put her and the Academy into mainstream timelines. Instagram+1

Bottom line

Susie Wolff concentrates the pipeline and performance story; Gracie Opulanza converts that attention into participation, purchasing, and permanence. One is the sport’s executive-mentor archetype with elite credibility inside the paddock; the other is a luxury-lifestyle translator with road-car authority and a decade of audience trust. In a sport now growing fastest among young women—but increasingly funded by premium partners—those two lanes are complementary, not competitive.